American Trucking Associations last week released a white paper outlining several ways the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration could improve assessment of its safety monitoring and measurement program Compliance, Safety, Accountability.
ATA points out that:
• Carriers' scores in three of CSA’s seven measurement categories (43% of the system) do not effectively identify future crash risk;
• FMCSA only has sufficient violation data to assign a percentile rank (in at least one category) to 12% of active carriers;
• a recent analysis by the American Transportation Research Institute noted that a perceived safety risk depends on the amount of data available on each motor carrier and that it is wrong to conclude carriers with insufficient data to be scored are safer than those that have reported data.
"In the spirit of providing a balanced assessment of CSA, we also hope FMCSA honors MCSAC's request that the subcommittee hear from independent researchers who have studied the relationships between CSA scores and crash risk," said ATA Vice President for Safety Policy Rob Abbott. "Achieving CSA's goal of reducing crashes, injuries and fatalities is of mutual concern to all stakeholders. Understanding if CSA effectively identifies carriers likely to cause crashes that result in injuries and fatalities should be the first step toward achieving this goal."
